Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State by Daniel Amsterdam (review)

Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State challenges the oft-perceived juxtaposition of the Progressive era and the 1920s. Using Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta as his case study cities, Daniel Amsterdam demonstrates occasional continuity between the pre–World War I Progressive (a term the author shuns) agenda and the 1920s attempts for urban reforms. The author shows how local elite businessmen and the higher-end professional class were often even more committed to directing money to build these cities than were their Progressive-era predecessors.

Through dramatically increased spending on urban infrastructure, schools, and recreational facilities, elite businessmen sought to create better workers by building better cities, serving businessmen's booster instincts and political and economic interests alike. While new schools, playgrounds, and decentralized neighborhoods improved the quality of life for the cities' working-class majorities, leading businessmen also fought to maintain their power over wages and working conditions. Amsterdam argues that these businessmen wanted to build a "civic welfare state," not a "social" one (p. 1).

While the businessmen's vision for their cities might have been conservative, their spending most definitely was not. In Detroit, government spending per capita rose 98 percent between 1916 and 1928, in Philadelphia 56 percent, and in Atlanta 55 percent. These cities struggled to keep up their services with the continued flow of in-migrants, both domestic and foreign. Rapid growth necessitated extensive investment in infrastructure. How this growth was channeled determined much of the character of the city. Businessmen emphasized decentralized neighborhoods and slum clearance as methods of turning urban workers into property-owning citizens and dedicated, civic-minded members of the community.

While Amsterdam emphasizes the centrality of these elite businessmen, he points out that their power was rarely (if ever) unchecked. Successful projects required building political alliances, be it with labor or older city machines. For example, in Atlanta, as Amsterdam points out, otherwise disenfranchised African Americans actually could vote in local bond referenda, skillfully using this power to improve their educational facilities and neighborhoods.

Roaring Metropolis is a very self-confident book, clearly organized and written with effective and persuasive prose. The research relies heavily on secondary literature and newspapers and other publications of the era, spiced with some archival research. The lack of bibliography is a minor inconvenience to a reader interested in exploring the topic further.

The three cities under study are well chosen, representing differing regional political traditions and political structures. An addition of a western city would have further expanded the book's reach and its thesis's universality. Occasionally, Amsterdam could be a bit more precise when categorizing his protagonists. His definition of elite businessmen takes its cue from Potter Stewart. The book is often better with telling than explaining. Its analysis remains underdeveloped at parts, overshadowed by the book's rich and nuanced data. While Roaring Metropolis offers a fair and informative account of the topic, expanding and improving our view of 1920s urban politics, Amsterdam ends with an oddly disjointed and ahistorical political call to use the lessons of the era for shaping present policies.

Roaring Metropolis is very useful reading for urban historians and excellent for graduate course discussions exploring the era and its politics. It offers a useful reminder of continuity for casual observers, who often are tempted to view the 1920s as a conservative breather between the hectic reforms of the Progressive and New Deal decades.